Is the Super Bowl a Master Class in Experience Exploration?

As the question goes: Are you ready for some football? That’s right…it’s Super Bowl time! This year’s championship game will be a far cry from the first Super Bowl at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. When the Kansas City Chiefs faced the Green Bay Packers back in 1967 at the ‘AFL-NFL World Championship Game”, there were only 11 television cameras and 2 production trucks doing the heavy lifting to capture the broadcast. Game statistics were calculated by hand by league statisticians sitting with pencils and play sheets up in the press box.

The game wasn’t a sell-out. Truth be told, the experience was pretty much just about the football. The halftime show was a thrilling showcase of two university marching bands. The modern spectacle of the half time show didn’t take off until Michael Jackson was booked in 1993. Super Bowl I had brands like Budweiser, Ford, Goodyear Tires and Winston cigarettes pitched the audience spending $42,000 per 30-second spot on the two networks (CBS and NBC) carrying the game. The second-half kickoff was redone because the NBC production crew was airing an interview with Bob Hope and missed the kickoff.

Super Bowl LX will reach a massive audience some predict could hit over 180 million globally. Hoping to capitalize on the captive audience, brands have paid between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second commercial on NBC with streaming placements on Peacock selling for between $2 to $3 million. Brands will battle it out with creative spots costing upwards of $20 million in creative and star power costs alone. Sure, some in the audience will be there to watch 22 players battle it out for a golden trophy, but others will tune in to catch Grammy award winning Bad Bunny hit the stage for the (yes, its branded) Apple Music Half Time Show. The NFL is throwing a party, and like any great host, is bringing a little something for everyone to enjoy.

For enterprises hoping to shake up their own experience strategies in 2026, the Super Bowl might just be a Master Class in experience strategy development, technology incubation and transformation acceleration. Here are just two ways that the NFL has leveraged technology to establish winning experience strategies.

The Muti-Purpose Data Strategy 

The NFL is a data generating machine. But starting in 2017, the NFL started to deliver on data differently, extending its partnership with AWS and expanding its Next Gen Stats (NGS) program. Initially developed as a player tracking data collection, the league reimagined how data could be leveraged for multiple purposes from player performance to fan experience. 

Zebra RFID chips are in the shoulder pads on every player and in every ball, collecting an estimated 250 data points every play. New innovations to the data ingest and capture now include the use of 4K cameras that capture 3D positions of players. With millions of data points per game, the NFL Next Gen Stats platform, powered by AWS, then generates up to 1,000 unique stats and points of insight per play, that can be accessed by coaches and broadcasters in milliseconds. Everything from how fast a player goes in a single play to AI-powered predictions on route visualizations to expected rushing yards can be leveled up to enhance broadcasts or driving faster critical on-field decisioning. 

To be able to deliver this real-time data powerhouse, AWS data scientists directly partnered with NFL engineers to build custom models and tracking systems to connect data science and AI techniques with the unique demands of the game.  The result has been a dizzying and ever-growing portfolio of AI-powered applications, models and stats that are valuable to teams, to players and to fans. 

New products and offerings from NFL’s media empire have also leveraged the value of NGS including the ESPN show, “MNF Playbook with Next Gen Stats”, that dives deeper into the data and the stats for an analysis for die-hard fans who want that extra layer of insight. During the Super Bowl, expect to see NGS insights throughout the broadcast, but also expect to hear these stats and predictions discussed by the on-air broadcast teams. Subscribers to NFL Pro will also enjoy advanced analytics and access to NGS tracking data. 

The NFL has turned a game the world knows and loves and turned it into a new experience, offering up deeper insights and meaningful intelligence that multiple stakeholders can access. Data isn’t just a single-note with one-purpose. Thanks to the NFL’s partnership with AWS, the league has diversified what some might consider a commodity and turned it into fuel for multiple diverse experiences across multiple critical stakeholders, extending the value and impact of their investment. 

This is the new frontier for enterprises actively investing in both infrastructure and data. While data has long been the “fuel” for transactional, customer and business decisioning, new opportunities for new offerings and new experiences could be on the horizon. The questions that will need to be asked will be how and where can curated data be reused across internal and external stakeholders? Are there partners that can co-invest and in turn co-create new businesses, new experiences or new opportunities for growth thanks to newly remixed data? Is there value in historical data or event analysis that has been collected over time? While data leveraged for decisions is critical, especially in the age of AI, data leveraged to augment engagement or even create a totally new experience is also an opportunity not to be overlooked.

The Fan Connection Content Strategy

Storytelling through football is at the core of the NFL’s engagement strategy. From the moment a player is drafted to the last moment a player walks off the Super Bowl field, there are moments that matter, and content creators waiting to add a new spin to the legend. In 2025, the NFL expanded its partnership with Adobe to bring technology, creativity, marketing experience and more than a little AI to the next generation of fan experience.

At the core of the partnership is the Adobe Experience Platform that enables the league and all 32 teams of the NFL to rapidly spin up fan engagement campaigns and initiatives with solutions ranging from Adobe Journey Optimizer, Customer Journey Analytics, Workfront and Firefly handling everything from project management and campaign development to creative content production and distribution. Content driven fan engagement is scalable through templates and accessible tools that put fans in the role of creator and storyteller. Through the NFL OnePass app, fans opt-in for highly personalized content that is not just tailored to their preferences, but can be enhanced with their own fandom. At the big game, Patriot fans can spin up any number of social media posts featuring NFL-themed Adobe Express templates. Not to play any favorites, there are also plenty of Seahawks images, icons and logos to turn an idea into a fan celebration. 

Professional creators also get a boost thanks to this partnership. During the regular season, over 140 NFL Live Content Correspondents (LCC) leverage Adobe Creative Cloud tools to create, edit and refine content. This NFL content is a fan-favorite as it often shows the moments behind the scenes, from the sidelines or celebrations in the locker room. When the celebration unleashes at the end of Super Bowl 60, it will be the LLCs capturing, editing and publishing in real time for real-time storytelling. Adobe has integrated GenAI capabilities into these tools giving these storytelling pros the powerful tools.

GenAi has also become an opportunity for fans to flex their own imagination with the AI Helmet Creator in Adobe Firefly. Fans can customize helmets by feeling inspired (and crafting their own prompt to describe color, style, mood and design) or be guided through some wildcard actions to land at their helmet powered by Adobe and the NFL, but personalized and created by a fan. Or perhaps a fan is in the mood to reimagine cleats based on their favorite team and their home town vibe, Adobe’s My Cause, My Cleats activation customizes a fan’s cleats with Adobe Firefly. Just don’t pick the nachos.

What any enterprise can tap into is the spirit of fun and creativity the NFL invites fans to take part in. Yes, there are plenty of assets, images, videos and templates that exist in the world of possible for a brand like the NFL, but every brand can invite fans to create, to imagine and become part of the brand’s content supply chain. But perhaps the greatest lesson every organization can take away from Adobe’s partnership with the NFL is that it starts and stops with a commitment to knowing fans so well that deeply personal experiences are as rich with context as they are with content. 

It also challenges the norms of where and how content can be created, edited and scaled with tools that are right-sized for the user and for the distribution channel. Every organization can rethink the when, how and who of content creation, arming creative teams with the firepower they expect while also giving permission and license to any employee to flex their creativity, albeit within brand guidelines. A Sales team with Adobe Express filled with brand images, templates and resources? A product design team with AI powered design tools that encourage exploration that could start from a doodle? 

So Much More to Explore

These are just two of the technology partnerships the NFL leverages as part of their operations and engagement stacks. The list of innovations continues to grow thanks to a league-wide commitment and intentional investment into their NFL Technology Innovation Hub. Established in 2024, the hub is billed as a “think tank” for emerging ideas where solutions and strategies can be designed and tested to ensure they align with the league’s goals. 

And this quick review doesn’t dive into the technologies used by the teams from the Seattle Seahawks leveraging a modern Customer Data Platform in Amperity to not just know and understand their fans, but to delivery personalized experiences to the Seahawk faithful around the world, to the New England Patriots turning to Salesforce to revolutionize fan service, insight and understanding. As one might expect, a report diving into these technology implementations and how to translate these use cases into enterprise environments is forthcoming. But for now, it’s time to sit back and watch the experience viewed by millions, but imagined for a fan-audience of one.